"Here in Azerbaijan we believe in human rights. PLEASE GIVE US YOUR FILM."

Oh, no, no, not good.

The enforcers here come in three colors: the military police still
wearing their old Russian puke-green uniforms, the MSN (the dictator's
secret police) in windbreakers without ID, and BP's own corporate police
force in black tunics, sashes and full hats who look like toy soldiers
from the Nutcracker ballet. They weren't dancing.

I showed all three flavors of police our press credentials in both
English and Azeri, neither of which could be read by the officers. (The
dictator had suddenly changed the Azeri alphabet, making most of the
nation illiterate overnight.)

The dictator made everyone call him, "Baba," Grandpa.

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I told the dumbest-looking one, "Look here: This paper says your
so-called President is a weasel's rectum," which our 'fixer' translated
as, "This letter from Foreign Ministry is authorization to make a
documentary for the British Television."

Now, it looked like I'd be spending Christmas in Baba's dungeon,
licking rats for breakfast. My clown-show antics bought the crew the
precious minutes needed to switch the film in the camera to blanks. Our
cameraman told a BP cop, with mime: "Hadn't begun filming yet, Old
Bean."

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We would now. I clicked on my hidden micro-cam.

A black SUV arrived on the remote desert track and unloaded its
impressive cargo, a colonel sprinkled with medals from the recent war
Azerbaijan lost to Armenia. The colonel said, "British Petroleum drives
this country," and as a "British" journalist, he thought I'd be as proud
of that fact as he is.

"I know," I said. "Believe me, I know."

There is an awful lot of evidence that BP and Britain's MI6 had their
hands in Baba's 1993 coup d'e'tat which overthrew the nation's elected
president. Within months of taking power, Baba signed "The Contract of
the Century" giving BP monopoly control of Azerbaijan's Caspian
reserves."

Baba headed the KGB when this Islamic land was an occupied "republic"
of the Soviet Union, the good old days of relative peace, freedom and
prosperity.

I was here in the desert to investigate a tip-off I'd had that BP had
a near-disaster at its Caspian offshore rig that was extraordinarily
similar to the Deepwater Horizon blow-out. But BP covered it up.

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What I didn't know was that WikiLeaks was about to release a State
Department memo which referred to a small piece of this BP game. Rather
than go to Azerbaijan to check the facts, the Wiki newspapers called BP
in London for comment.

That put BP on high alert and my sources in high danger.

So the Baba-BP police were more than curious about our film which we
promised was about nothing more than, "the business boom in Central
Asia." Of course, we didn't add that the only business booming here is
corruption and BP's oil drilling. (I don't use the plural here because
it is a single industry.)

Greg Palast's investigative reports appear in Rolling Stone, the Guardian and on BBC Television. His latest film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, on how Donald Trump stole the 2016 election, is available on Amazon. Palast is Patron of the Trinity (more...)